books.google.com - The New York Times bestselling author heralds the future of business in Free.In his revolutionary bestseller, The Long Tail, Chris Anderson demonstrated how the online marketplace creates niche markets, allowing products and consumers to connect in a way that has never been possible before. Now, in Free,...https://books.google.com/books/about/Free.html?id=lLZbXN2odVYC&utm_source=gb-gplus-shareFree

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Well, I wish I could write something about this book, but I can't even read it what with the link for the print version not working on Android and the ebook costing twice what I think it should. Nice going, Google!

The best things in life are free, or so the old saying goes. These days, however, it seems that more and more companies and retailers are trying to get us something for free, and it is becoming increasingly doubtful that all of those freebies are the best that life can offer. Nonetheless, all this free stuff has certainly contributed to making many aspects of our daily lives simpler and more convenient, especially when it comes to those parts of our lives that we spend in digital world. The raise of free predates computers, and it has a venerable history in the annals of marketing. Chris Anderson, the editor in chief of the "Wired Magazine" and the author of insightful "Long tail," narrates the greatest highlights of the history giving products for free. He also explains the rationale behind how the prices get set in a free market, and the reason why in the absence of almost any production costs we can expect products to eventually end up free. The reason that there is a proliferation of free nowadays has everything to do with the fact that the cost of creating and moving bits of information around is essentially zero. Anderson spends an entire chapter defending the free model against its many critics. He takes every common objection to free that has been heard in recent years and provides a cogent and well-informed refutation. How convincing his arguments are, however, may depend on your own attitude and point of view. At the end of the book there is a list of fifty different business models where products or services are given out for free. This is a useful list for anyone considering a cutting-edge modern business, and for the rest of us it gives us an opportunity to take a look at what kinds of things can be obtained for free these days. Overall, this is an interesting book that takes a look at modern economy form a very unique angle. Only the time will tell if the paradigms used in this analysis will survive the test of time or are they just the latest fad.

Chris Anderson’s Free: the Future of Radical Prices discusses current and past trends of the $0.00 price phenomenon. He delves into the business strategies that charge nothing, yet remain profitable enterprises. This trend of “Free” business is all possible because of technologies and their rapid declines in the price of operations. In essence, companies can deliver a tremendous amount of content for a very cheap (an still shrinking) price of operation. The marginal costs of doing business on the internet are so low that they are soon approaching zero! So how do companies survive by having overhead costs yet charge supposable nothing for their services? A concept called “cross subsidies”. For example, a company can provide content on their website, the website attracts users and participants, and the website tries to monetize the users of their site by selling advertising space on the site. The advertiser pays the web content provider for the rights to place ads on the site, and users will view the ads and “click through” if they are interested. In essence, the advertiser is subsidizing the cost of the site and in essence making the site free for the user. Google is a huge player in the market space which virtually owns the online marketing arena. So how viable is such a business model? Free content is only as good as the advertising is on your site. Free is a business model many internet companies have embraced almost by the prospect of extinction. If your site is the only one charging a subscription, and one can get virtually the same information on a “free” site, your site will be out of business. Unless companies can differentiate with proprietary technologies or information, they are all competing in a commodity type business destined for uncertainty and lackluster profits. However, the book contends that people are happier doing things when they are free. With the onset of free multimedia, publications, and various other outlets, the internet becomes a virtual stage for almost anyone with a computer and willing to contribute keystrokes to voice their opinion or thoughts. The vast amount of free information makes it difficult for people to charge fees for subscriptions so companies are force to reevaluate their business models. I think the book was an interesting read that provided insider insights and perspective due to his career. However, not many new points have been raised. Also, “The Future” as the book claims in its title seemed more of a synopsis of history and current trends. I am not convinced that future will remain the same.

“Free: The Future of a Radical Price” is another thought provoking book by Chris Anderson. In this book, he discusses the concept of “free” products and services. As we all know, nothing in this world is truly free, and Anderson elaborates this point over 200 pages of enjoyable and fast-paced text. Anyone who’s taken an economics class knows that, in most cases, competition is good for the consumer because price decreases and quality increases. What Chris Anderson is saying is that in order to attract more customers, this competition will inevitably lead to prices of zero. Anderson states that the word “Free” comes from the social notion of freedom from slavery and cost; Anderson’s book focuses, of course, on the cost portion of this definition. He starts off by explaining an example almost everyone can relate to when he explains how Gillette would sell their razors super cheap in order to increase demand for the more expensive and higher profit margin disposable blades. This is an example of what Anderson calls a direct cross-subsidiary which is the first of his four “Free Models”. A direct cross-subsidiary means that in order to get consumers to buy one product, a company will sell that product’s compliment at a low price. The other three free-markets are the three-party market, freemiums, and non-monetary markets. The three-party system is the most common of the Free markets. In this system, two parties interact for free, while a third party pays to participate in this exchange. For example, it is free to listen to the radio (aside from the fixed cost of buying a radio) because advertisers pay the broadcasters. Next, a freemium is something that is seen most commonly on the internet. An example Anderson gives in the book is the website Flickr. It does not cost anything to use Flickr, however, if you want to “go pro” for $2.00 a month to become a premium member, you get unlimited uploads, account stats, ad-free browsing, and other perks. Finally, the last of the Free markets is the non-monetary markets. These are instances where people choose to give things away with no expectation of payment. A great example of this is peer-to-peer file sharing. One person will upload an album and thousands of people will download this file from the original uploader or the thousands of other people who downloaded it. None of the downloader’s or uploaders benefit directly from this transaction, however, in the long run they benefit because a community is built where no one has to pay for music if they don’t want to.As of the writing of this book, there is no way to properly calculate the value of the Free market, however, Anderson estimates that its value is somewhere around the $300 billion mark. Anderson ends the book with some nice tidbits. His “Ten Free Rules” sum up the book quite well, next, his freemium tactics give you a ways to think about offering freemiums to your own customers, his fifty business models built on Free bring even more real world context, and finally his gives a website where you can download this book in audio form, making this text literally free!I really enjoyed the flow of this book, even more so than his previous work, “The Long Tail”. I feel that he grew as a writer between the time he wrote The Long Tail and Free. I stated before that I liked the conversationalist style of his writing, and with his new book he hasn’t changed his approach. This time around he chose to add in about a dozen “side-bars”. These all posed the question, “How can _____ be free?” In these side-bars, he explains how companies can afford to offer services such as Free DVR or to give away a free CD in a famous magazine. I don’t think that this book’s readership should be limited to the business and tech world; I think that everyone would enjoy this book. Although nothing in here is ground-breaking, the text was very entertaining. I was constantly thinking of how these ideas, strategies and principles showed up in my own life. I give this

3 stars? Yes, 3 stars. Let me follow this with a disclaimer that this in no way diminished my celebrity obsession with Chris Anderson. It seems to me Anderson thought FREE was his Golden Budda sitting atop the pedestal of his previous book The Long Tail. Free was suppose to be the next step, full of enlightenment and insight. But FREE is nothing more than a verbose chapter in The Long Tail, Anderson's true Golden Budda. I'm just not excited about the theories and reasons behind why things are FREE, which is the real problem with the book (sorry Chris). Research shows people get really excited when things are free, but this doesn't mean they also get excited to learn about why it's free. I didn't find myself working theories and concepts from the book into conversations with friends. Possibly because I'm an internet native the idea of things being truly free isn't as mind-boggling to me as someone who's an immigrant.That's not saying there wasn't great information and research in the book. I just think it was 50-100 pages worth and not 250 pages worth. I didn't not mark off because of Chris Anderson's notoriously officious writing style or the fact that he used Wikipedia as a source. If anything I was glad to see him use Wikipedia and make the line between amateur and professional a little more blurry than it already is. ***I'd also like to give special thanks to Chris Anderson for sending me, a poor college student a signed copy after I mentioned that I hoped to read the book. To those of you think I may have discounted the ideas in the book because I didn't have pay for it, I borrow The Long Tail from a friend and didn't pay for that one either.*** Tim Ernst timothyernst@gmail.com